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A mentally shackled Nehru on 15th August 1947 - could not break free of the English

The old culture managed to live through many a fierce storm and tempest, but though it kept its outer form, it lost its real content. Today it is fighting silently and desperately against a new and all-powerful opponent — the bania civilisation of the capitalist West. It will succumb to the newcomer, for the West brings science, and science brings food for the hungry millions. But the West also brings an antidote to the evils of this cut-throat civilisation — the principles of socialism, of cooperation, and service to the community for the common good. This is not so unlike the old Brahmin idea of service. (from Jawaharlal Nehru, an autobiography: with musings on recent events in India By Jawaharlal Nehru via Nehru: Man Among Men By Raja R. Mehrotra).

Bad start

India and Nehru got off to wrong start at the very first instant. When he made his ‘famous’ tryst with destiny speech, who was Nehru talking to? To the less than 5% Indians who understood English? If Free India’s first Prime Minister did not see fit to talk to Indians intelligibly, how close or how much did he care for India?

Indian tradition

In Upanishadic times, there was the Nachiketa story, where his rich Brahman father, Uddalaka, /Vajasrava, was ‘giving’ away old, barren, unproductive cows – and keeping the best for himself. Obviously, Uddalaka, /Vajasrava did not become rich through ‘selfless’ service. Probably, Nehru was not Brahmin enough to know this lesson. Or we can blame his British school, Harrow. Why did they not teach him anything much about Upanishads?

The Tibetan-Buddhist student, Marpa, the Translator (1012–1099), was warned by a co-traveller “If you go to India without lots of gold, searching for dharma will be like trying to drink water from an empty gourd.” Interestingly, Naropa, the Indian teacher forced Marpa to give up his entire stock of gold. Having extracted all of Marpa’s gold, Naropa threw all the gold dust, up in the air, exclaiming that the whole world was gold to him. Where was Nehru’s much-vaunted Brahmin idea of service then. Nehru’s ideas of Brahminical selfless service were alien to India – as were his ideas of rampant, extractive, profiteering banias.

Indian trade ethics

Indian banias were limited in their profit-taking by शुभ लाभ ‘shubh-labh’ ethics. It is शुभ लाभ shubh labh, that prevents traditional Indian merchant community, from dealing with slaves, drugs and alcohol. The ‘green’ agenda of शुभ लाभ shubl labh, also prevents traditional banias from dealing in meat products. Unlike Nehru’s British banias whose wealth was created from slave trade – apart from drugs and alcohol.

On slavery, the very basis of Western dominance, in his autobiography of nearly 500 pages, Nehru mentions slavery less than 5 times. Which just goes onto to show how well the Indian colonial masters had ‘supressed’ their own real history and source of wealth.

Underneath the Western sky

Colonial India’s English push was understandable. But, Nehru’s imposition of English on India is beyond defence. What more, after 60 years of Independence, state patronage of English language is unwarranted by the Indian Republic – and illegitimate. Making sense of the newly formed Indian nation was herculean task – even for Nehru. After more than a century of propaganda, Western ‘education’, inversion of history, post-colonial Indian rulers struggled between the ‘glossy’ imported idioms and the familiar native dialogue.

Caught in this dilemma, the Nehruvian Indian State vacillates between a unique Indic inheritance and the detritus of dead-end colonialism.

Assault on Indian academia

Nehru - at his Harrowian best!

Mohammed Bakhtiar Khilji destroyed the Universities and schools of Nalanda, Vikramshila, Odantapura and Jagddala around 1200 AD. This marked the destruction, persecution and decline in Indian education, thought and structure. 600 years later, the British further damaged the Indic system of education, with State subsidies and patronage of Western education – the watershed being Bentinck’s proclamation in 1835.

Thus, the reduced (quality and quantity) output from the ‘Indian thought factory’ led to stasis and the decline that we see today – through the prism of last 800 years of violence and destruction of Indic thought. This problem gets further magnified with the existing and continued subsidy to English language /Western education by the Indian Government.

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